In radiosurgery or radiotherapy (collectively referred to as radiation treatment) very intense and precisely collimated doses of radiation are delivered to a target region in the body of a patient in order to treat or destroy lesions. Typically, the target region is composed of a volume of tumorous tissue. Radiation treatment requires an extremely accurate spatial localization of the targeted lesions. As a first step in performing radiation treatment, it is necessary to determine with great precision the location of a lesion and any surrounding critical structures, relative to the reference frame of the treatment device. Computed tomography (“CT”), magnetic resonance imaging (“MRI”) scans, and other imaging modalities enable practitioners to precisely locate a lesion relative to skeletal landmarks or implanted fiducial markers. However, it is also necessary to control the position of the radiation source so that its beam can be precisely directed to the target tissue while avoiding adjacent critical body structures.
Thus radiation treatment necessitates high precision diagnosis and high precision radiation source control. The consequences of deviating outside the prescribed tolerances for the diagnosis and the radiation source control can be potentially devastating to a patient. Accordingly, quality assurance mechanisms should be implemented to ensure proper alignment and configuration of the radiation delivery system prior to delivering a prescribed radiation dose to a patient.
Conventional quality assurance mechanisms include pointing the radiation source at an alignment marker, delivering a radiation dose to the alignment marker, and then analyzing the alignment marker itself to determine if the prescribed dose was actually delivered to the correct location. If the prescribed dose was delivered as expected, then the radiation treatment delivery system is deemed properly aligned. If the prescribed dose was not delivered as expected, then the radiation treatment delivery system is deemed misaligned.
Conventional alignment markers include silver loaded gels capsules or photographic film canisters that can store readable information about the distribution of the radiation dose delivered to the alignment marker. However, these alignment markers are static objects that neither resemble an actual patient nor move as a patient would due to breathing. As such, prior art alignment markers do not adequately recreate the actual conditions that exist during delivery of a prescribed dose of radiation to a living patient.